Islamic cultural center literally across the street from a Christian church and daycare where I live. And yet they're not killing each other.
I live in a hellhole of gangs, political corruption, teenaged murderers, drug dealers and addicts, a shocking shortage of police presence, wandering mental patients lazily cut loose from the system when the local asylum closed down, and people who drive like they belonged in said asylum, all in the shadow of one of Canada's worst serial killers.
And yet the Christians and Muslims refrain from fighting over religion passing each other on the street daily. A preteen stabbed a man to death when he wouldn't give him a cigarette but the "demon brood" plays with the Christian kids after their respective prayer services without incident. The mentally ill wander the streets on rare occasion wearing clown makeup or with cabbage patch dolls shoved down the fronts of their pants laughing to themselves and people just kind of ignore it. But the "mortal enemies" plotting to kill us all and take everything we have are not a threatening sight at all. This is a place of insanity where the cops are literally rented out from other cities, where man's darkest nature boils over with alarming frequency but like a Stephen King novel people seem reluctant to discuss it, where you can feel Death's icy breath on your back in the middle of the day and swear he must be checking his watch every few minutes waiting for something to happen to you. And yet I have no more to fear from the Muslims living in my town than I do anyone else I'll pass in the street.
When I lived in Calgary and worked for ABCRC the majority of the people I worked with were Muslims. And black, if we'd care to cover multiple prejudices. They didn't single me out, they didn't push me away, they didn't mistreat me, I was just a guy they worked with. I was one of them, they were all of mine. My co-workers. My fellow Canadians. My friends. Well there was the one asshole who tried to play the discrimination card on everyone he could at every opportunity to the point where he was kind of a running gag but nobody liked him.
So forgive me if my life experience in both a perfectly normal setting of daily life in a city that some people think of as Canada's Texas and a place that only wants you to think it's a perfectly normal setting before it eats your soul and the very memory of you with it leaving the next poor fool to wander in oblivious to it's unnatural hidden miasma of danger paint you as such a lying fuckstick I'm tempted to slap you upside the head.